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Ah, the nuances of how we construct online personas...
In a lot of places where I talk about heavy metal online, I use a gender-neutral name and avatar. This wasn't originally a conscious choice, but once I noticed I'd done it by accident, I kept it up. Partly because it's an interesting social experiment to see how often people casually assume that I'm male, and partly because it's kind of nice to be able to scope out an online space a bit before deciding to take on the burden of identifying as female. I never go out of my way to hide that I'm a woman, but I might go quite a long time without bringing it up.
But I've also recently made contact with a number of French-speaking metal fans and although almost all of them have some degree of English fluency, I'm dipping my toe in the waters of interacting with them in French. It's kind of cool - the international language of heavy metal is this kind of fractured English, so I feel much less self conscious about the fact that I probably go around sounding like this: "Warmest salutations! I like very much your metals, for they possess truly the heaviness!"
The weird thing, though, is that the grammatical requirement for gender agreement between subject and adjective really throws the gender issue into sharp relief. Because it makes it really obvious when someone assumes that I'm male. And I can't even say something simple like "I am American," or "I am happy," without feeling like I'm effectively tacking "AND I'M A GIRL" onto the end.
I'm curious whether other people have noticed this, especially those of you who are much more bilingual than I am. Those of you whose native tongue is a language with gender agreement between subject and adjectives - when you interact with people online in English, do you notice the reduced frequency of obvious gender markers? How do you feel about it?
In a lot of places where I talk about heavy metal online, I use a gender-neutral name and avatar. This wasn't originally a conscious choice, but once I noticed I'd done it by accident, I kept it up. Partly because it's an interesting social experiment to see how often people casually assume that I'm male, and partly because it's kind of nice to be able to scope out an online space a bit before deciding to take on the burden of identifying as female. I never go out of my way to hide that I'm a woman, but I might go quite a long time without bringing it up.
But I've also recently made contact with a number of French-speaking metal fans and although almost all of them have some degree of English fluency, I'm dipping my toe in the waters of interacting with them in French. It's kind of cool - the international language of heavy metal is this kind of fractured English, so I feel much less self conscious about the fact that I probably go around sounding like this: "Warmest salutations! I like very much your metals, for they possess truly the heaviness!"
The weird thing, though, is that the grammatical requirement for gender agreement between subject and adjective really throws the gender issue into sharp relief. Because it makes it really obvious when someone assumes that I'm male. And I can't even say something simple like "I am American," or "I am happy," without feeling like I'm effectively tacking "AND I'M A GIRL" onto the end.
I'm curious whether other people have noticed this, especially those of you who are much more bilingual than I am. Those of you whose native tongue is a language with gender agreement between subject and adjectives - when you interact with people online in English, do you notice the reduced frequency of obvious gender markers? How do you feel about it?
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